“Stop yelling at me,” he said. This stranger, a man who I’d never met and was expecting to save my business from disaster, said those very words and spun me around completely. When I got off the phone with him a few minutes later, I was shaken. His voice would be permanently imprinted in my memory as the one that delivered a truth I needed to hear: I was forgetting myself in the relentless pursuit of entrepreneurial success.

It was the first summer I was in business, and the dry desert heat of my hometown came on strong, bringing a steady stream of customers through the door looking for ice-cold smoothies and air-conditioned relief from the scorching sun outside. Great news for me, except for one thing: my AC was on the fritz. I’d spent a few hundred thousand dollars to get my store built, and here it…read>>